The Shape of Things to Come

In the near future, the laptop’s many forms and features will amaze us all

By Joe Mullich

Imagine that your laptop could be reconfigured into different shapes and sizes, like a Transformer toy, depending on your computing task at any given moment. Or that it could be solar-powered, giving you an almost limitless power supply. Or that it could serve as “the brain” of your house, managing everything from appliances to your personal diabetes monitor.

Some of these notions exist in prototype; others are tantalizing theories. Experts were asked to predict what the laptop will look like, and what technological breakthroughs will appear, over the next decade. While their views varied, one clear consensus formed: In an increasingly mobile society, where laptops have already passed desktop computers in popularity, these devices will exert an ever-greater influence on how we work, communicate and live.

On the Drawing Board

“Right now, laptops all pretty much come in the same form factor,” says Rob Lather, manager of client computing for CDW Corp., an $8 billion technology reseller launched in 1984. “Imagine if you could have a flexible screen that rolls up or a keyboard that retracts and goes into the machine when you don’t need it. That would be a very durable laptop.”

Actually, you don’t have to imagine. Concept designers have already produced drawings, videos or prototypes of such machines, some of which can be purchased today, albeit at a hefty price tag. Consider the Slider Ultra Mobile, a handheld computer with a 9-inch touch screen, which has been much praised as an example of a forward-looking laptop. When you slide the screen up and out, similar to some cell phones, a full QWERTY keyboard is revealed underneath it.

The most flexible concept may be Prime, a Transformer-type device conceived by industrial designer Kyle Cherry in 2008 when he couldn’t find a portable computer with a screen suited to the varied demands of both CAD and design software. Prime is composed of six aluminum wings—three with display screens, one with a keyboard, and two blank surfaces for the electronics—that can be reconfigured into different shapes, from a standard 13-inch notebook for word processing to a super-wide 21-inch notebook for gaming. The whole thing can be folded up into a compact unit for travel. Right now, the idea is just a CAD drawing, but Cherry says it could be made today with current technology.

“Everyone could use a computer that adapts to a wide range of needs,” Cherry says. “Just look at all the different form factors on the market—smartphones, tablets, netbooks and notebooks. While I don’t think a configurable laptop can replace a smartphone, I do think it can make an impact on the rest of the market.”

While such ideas intrigue the Star Wars fan in many of us, technical—and psychological—realities of laptop use are complicated. Foldable keyboards, for instance, introduce an additional mechanical component that is susceptible to wear-and-tear. Laptop design is a matter of balance, shaving grams off the connectors and processor to reduce weight, while maintaining a sense of sturdiness.

“Let me give you one example of what makes it so hard to predict what will succeed in the marketplace,” says Howard Locker, master inventor for Lenovo, maker of the ThinkPad and other cutting-edge computer equipment. “Everyone wants smaller, lighter devices. At one point, we designed a desktop keyboard that was so light people felt it couldn’t be sturdy. The keyboard worked perfectly fine, but we had to add a metal plate just to give it weight so it would seem sturdier.”

For all the wow factor of foldable, rollable and reconfigurable laptop concepts, in Locker’s view, the clamshell design is the present and future standard. “The traditional clamshell goes back to the first typewriter in 1870,” he says. “Ergonomically, it’s the perfect form factor in terms of size and shape for a laptop, and I don’t see that ever changing for the mass market, though there might be a wide range of specialty devices for individual users.”

Keeping in Touch

Right now, people interact with the laptop primarily through the screen, keyboard, and mouse or trackpad. Laptop screens are improving rapidly, and the options for controlling a laptop by touch, speech or other means could expand over the coming decade.

Lather of CDW says he wouldn’t be surprised if the wide screen becomes the standard laptop format instead of the current rectangular form. “We are starting to see OLED [light emitting diode that is made of thin films of organic molecules], which charge each pixel instead of backlighting the screen, producing brighter, clearer images,” he says.

High-end 3-D notebooks will emerge this year, and Locker says “the holy grail” is 3-D without glasses. That would allow physicians at a patient’s bedside to get a clear look at medical scans or an architect at a building site to review technical plans. Locker imagines that the computer will be able to use 3-D images to categorize files, so, for example, an architect might be able to intuitively click to find the exact information he needs.

Many designers are working to overcome the biggest nemesis of the laptop—the sun. Laptops are difficult to use outdoors today, because sunlight overwhelms their translucent screens. “We are about 70 percent of the way to having good color displays with high refresh rates that are as easy to view outdoors as in your office,” Locker says. He expects incremental technology advances to bring that up to 100 percent in two to three years, and the cost differential between sun-friendly and sun-adverse screens to disappear within five to six years. He notes that once laptop screens can be viewed as easily outdoors as indoors, the potential usage is expected to expand dramatically.

There will be a growing need for multi-touch screen laptops within education, which allow you to move images around the screen by touching them. “If you’re trying to teach kids with flashcards on a computer screen, it would be even better if they didn’t have to click a keyboard,” Lather points out.

Industrial designer Jonathan Lucas has taken the idea of touch one step further. He developed a laptop concept for the blind called the Siafu PC, a finalist in Microsoft’s 2008 Next-Gen PC Design Competition. Instead of using a screen, the Siafu—named after a blind ant found in West Africa and Congo—is built around a conceptual material that converts web images into 3-D shapes. For example, a newspaper photo of a person’s face would be converted into bumps and protrusions that a blind person would “read” with his fingers.

“In seven to ten years, laptops could be doing things that astound us,” says Jack Gold, who founded the technology analyst firm J. Gold Associates after serving as an executive at META Group, Xerox and Digital Equipment Corp. “I’m not just talking about roll-up screens, but mind melds where we control devices with our thoughts. That sounds futuristic, but it’s not as far-fetched as people think and most of this stuff is scientifically feasible.”

Indeed, experimental technology has been used where computer chips are implanted in the brain, which pick up electrical impulses that a computer can interpret. With this technology, one paraplegic was able to play computer games guided by his thoughts.

Power Tools

The biggest inhibitor to laptop advances over the next five to ten years could be battery life. “Batteries use a chemical process that doesn’t follow Moore’s law [the principle that computing power doubles every two years],” Gold says.

An ongoing strategy is to architect laptops in ways that reduce power usage. Lather notes the growth of solid-state drives could bring a number of benefits; he believes this could become the default in laptops within three to four years as their prices drop. With no moving parts, solid-state drives are more durable, so “people wouldn’t have to worry about dropping their laptops,” Lather says. “And because the solid-state drives are smaller, the extra space could go to larger batteries that provide more power.”

The relationship between drives and batteries also shows the intricate effect that one component of a laptop has on the others. “The laptop is like a jigsaw puzzle,” Locker says. “I can make a laptop today that gives you 20 hours of battery life; the problem is it would weigh too much. When laptops first started, the issues were all about speed and performance. Now it’s about battery life and wireless connectivity.”

Inventors are experimenting with plenty of other power sources, such as reclaiming body heat or using the sun. Two years ago, Serbian designer Nikola Knezevic took a clamshell laptop and added a second hinged lid covered with solar panels. The lid can be folded out to catch the maximum amount of the sun’s rays.

“At the time when the concept was conceived, a solar panel of the proposed size couldn’t recharge batteries quickly, but technology advances rapidly and laptops will use less energy. Batteries will have more capacity and solar panels will be more efficient,” Knezevic says. “I believe this concept has a good future.”

Customized Computing

Experts foresee an expanding variety of laptop styles and models, with a higher degree of personalization. “The difference between notebooks, tablets and netbooks is blurry today, and it’s going to become even more blurry in three years,” Gold says.

He sees the laptop market mimicking the automobile industry, where categories are divided into narrow segments, like subcompact, trucks and SUVs. “The computing environment will become even more diverse, and I’m not sure we will even use the word laptop anymore,” he says. “We’ll have different types of computers for different types of users.”

Higher personalization could result in things like laptops with swappable video cards, as is now the case with desktop computers. It would allow, say, a gamer to buy a less expensive laptop and replace the video card to gain a desirable image quality. “Currently, when you buy a laptop you don’t have the option to swap out the video card,” Lather says.

While much focus is put on high-end uses, many believe that laptops will also become the “entry computer” for emerging nations. Locker says a single laptop in such locales might be shared by many people, placing a higher premium on durability and ease of reconfiguring the device for individual users. In some remote villages, laptops are literally powered by bicycles, providing a poignant reminder of the diversity of future computing needs.

The Next Decade

The surging popularity of laptops can be traced to WiFi networks, which provide mobile access to data. The continuing development of high-speed networks provided at a lower cost could make “the laptop the brain of the house,” Locker says. The laptop could become the aggregator of all of a person’s information and applications, which would be stored in the “cloud”—offsite data centers that are accessed through the Internet. In essence, all our information—utility usage, financial information, medical information—would be turned into digital form that would flow through the laptop.

Gold gives one example of how the laptop as “a central information hub of our world” might work. A person with a heart condition might wear a monitor that would track his blood pressure and other vital signs. This information would be fed wirelessly into the central laptop, which would relay it for storage, and to a physician, allowing instant analysis and alerts when needed.

The growing importance of laptops, and the information stored on them, could put a higher premium on security. Some advances might be largely unnoticed by users, such as “virtualization” techniques that isolate a nasty virus to one part of a laptop, while keeping the data on other parts of the device safe. Other security developments could revolutionize how we perform everyday activities.

Recently, the military and security-conscious businesses have embraced laptops with biometrics, such as fingerprint identification. “It’s a long way off, but since the majority of laptops now have a web cam, I could see advanced security technology where the laptop’s web cam does facial recognition before it will let you boot up,” Lather says. However, the technology may evolve faster than user acceptance. “People take time to adapt to new technology.”

Five years from now, Gold predicts “you won’t be able to buy a laptop that doesn’t come with continuous wireless connectivity, which by then will be the 5G network.” In the long term—seven to ten years—Lather hypothesizes that advances in holography could change the very concept of what a laptop is. “Today, you can buy a USB flash drive about the size of your pinky finger with over 100 gigabytes of storage space,” he says. “The components of the computer could, theoretically, be placed in a device that small, and it could have a light source that creates a holographic projection of a screen and keyboard that we work from.”

Admittedly, Lather says that idea is “way out there.” But if you consider the staggering technological advances over the last quarter century or so, it’s likely that a scientist in some lab is right now working on a laptop idea no one else has imagined—one that will, once again, change life as we know it.

Joe Mullich has written for InformationWeek, PC Week, Network Computing and Family PC.